Borges Bakhtin and the OED

If Jorge and Mikhail had their way the OED would not merely cite every representative use of a word throughout history; it would cite every actual iteration, showing the differing nuances of meaning that emerge and accrue (or diminish or turn aside) a necessary correlate of the absolute uniqueness, the unrepeatability, of every moment. It would also there cite every quotation of every iteration, every undergraduate's particular reading and reciting of Hamlet, excluding only misuses, misunderstandings and misreadings but including the use of every word in a definition in the OED.

If you add Derrida to the dictionary you'd have to include in the already infinite book every misreadings and every misspeaking as well.

Words and Meaning II

The Impossibility of the Dictionary

A Spade a Spade
My Kingdom for a Spade

Arise My Love, Arise My Love:
Apollo's Lighting the Skies My Love

A Rose by Any Other Name
Still Would Not Be a Rose

Gentlemen: Choose Your Title

Here is the danger of the notion that words have meaning: It is the danger of believing that things as such exist. "Why don't you call it by its name?" Because it doesn't have one. It is not a question of the abitrary nature of the signifier merely. It is the "arbitrary" (in de Saussure's sense, which is only tentatively related to what is generally capable of supporting the name "arbitrary") "nature" "of" "the" "signified" (all words require quotation marks, which, for sheer convience, will, from this word forth, be invisible, mostly). A horse, a chair, a word, a duck: "things" "[that]" "exist" but not as horses or chairs or words or ducks. They are all existants momentarily snapshot-frozen into a form which we, running along beside them in the restless race of time, accidentally perceive as namable. Poor Adam; his very first test could not be passed. Was it not for naming the animals that he lost paradise? "Species" change--we could use the name "grow" here--from one "thing" to another. We call it evolution when we take a wider-angle shot and put our series of frozen snapshots in filmic sequence. It was a dinosaur, now it is a bird; who knows what it will be when if finally matures, which it will never do. Think of the butterfly who starts a journey from Mexico, arriving generations later, in Canada, returning, generations later, to Mexico.

Evening and Morning, the First Day.

Still Life

Cut oranges glasses galoshes
big fruit bowls of
apples onions autumn
leaves broken
sticks

circle
of dog ears miniature cattle
dead ducks limp bodies
frozen setter
eyes ablaze
lolling tongue
water glaze

life still
waiting a clock
paused a man a
house a yard a street a
lamp a job a wife a
sleep a life

still a
planet spun still
cold planets colder
stars dark space black
holes still a
trace a
lack

A, the novel, at Red Hen

"We Have Another Vocabulary For That"

A comment today on NPR regarding the "war" on terror--that it could have been framed as a legal action, "Let's bring these criminals to justice" rather than a war. Problem with the war metaphor: you can't wage a war against a strategy.

We have another vocabulary: that of law, in which the victory is merely justice, which like heaven, is another rendition of the vocabulary of economics. Law, religion and money deploy the same structure through different vocaularies.

We have a different vocabulary means, really, we have a different structure through which to think it, since it lacks an inherent structure. We have a different vocabulary. We do not, however, have enough vocabularies, enough structures. If several structures are, essentially, the same, despite a variety of vocabularies, what a writer can bring to the mix is not a new vocaulary, but a novel structure. Neither war nor gold.

Book Lovers

We crawl under the covers
of a book,
lie
between the lines,
make love,
smoke the words.

It’s all very dangerous.
It’s not even our book.
Anyone could peek between
the sheets, follow to our hiding place
the ashes
smeared by our bare feet
across the pages.

Careless, we laugh our footprints
along the ridge and loosen the spine,
we pore over fields of text, page
on page, rolling in the leaves,
setting each sentiment,
each groping groping sentence,
ablaze.

Thinking Without Words

I'm trying to think like a chimp, without the hope of words. What happens?

First, I must acknoweldge that I can't. I can't erase all words from my thinking. I can imagine a scene, a photo, a person, but I cannot strip from my scene all sense of language--language understood as verbal. I can walk the paths of my garden; I can pass through the break in the stone wall and enter the woods, but my flowers and my trees have their names carved on them, and my movements are described in terms.

Second I perceive that everything available to a pre-verbal primate is still available to me, under the words. The pictures are vivid. I could find my way through the paths by various signs that are not verbal if I did not have words. I could feel the longing for the warm sunny spot where I enjoyed my morning. And I could find it without words. Would I be thinking in pictures: Yes, but not syntactically. And not only in pictures, because I have more than eyes. I have encoded the the path in odors. As long as I feel the urge of desire to find the sunny spot of long grass, I don't have to remember why I am moving in this direction. I am saying "yes" or "no" at every step, at every stump, at every smell. I may have encoded this memory a year ago and never thought of it since, and I my memory may be more clouded than I realize. But I say, without words, without "saying" "here" and "not hear." I feel the corresponding rightness when I see the mark on the path; it is a sign because it conjures the nod of feeling.

I don't know "tree" and I don't know "stone" and I don't know "cold" or "muddy" as words. But I nonetheless have them as concepts. I know all these tall hard grey musties are the same. I even know some are more suitable for climbing, more comfortable for sitting, for finding food in. I know the path to the wamn sunny grasses passes a stone like this and a tree like that.

Thus I survive without words, via memories coded in feelings evoked through sudden associations. I don't know because I cannot conjure at will, when I am not beside the termites that I can strip a branch and drop it in the hole and pull it out full of food. But I know when I am there. And in my dreams I repeat, I code, my branch and my termites and, lying between my warm mate and my warm child, my warm sunny spot in the tall grass.

Words and Meaning I

What is the best analogy for the relationship between a word and its meaning? Perhaps it is the analogy of money to its value.

The Wet Log

Too much depends
upon

A wet log
that won’t burn

In the middle
of the fire.

Shit.

In the Eye of the Heron

In the eye of the heron
on the bridgerail so close to the car
we could almost disturb with our hands his circle
of awareness we are
an object
gliding harmlessly past

He wafts to the stream
where we soak in the ice of the mountain
And I stare at the eye not staring at me
And he sees
nothing—
a scrap of motion

Dead, he seems to me.
Dead in his eye,
a machine—

neither food nor threat
we do not exist
for this unflappable bird.

grey on the edge of all this commotion
grey on the rocks beside the black trees
close almost close enough
to touch
shadow enough to be
invisible

finds nothing, launches
his great grey bulk, shark of the air—why should he seem so graceful—his
enormous wings, silent as his eye, raise him
above, just above, our heads, and carry him, a line
drawn down the center of the stream, around
the corner
out of sight
of the dozens floating, dozens splashing,
one woman bent forward on strong stalks
washing her long blonde hair.

Inside the House Outside the Garden

I did not think of you this year when robins’
sudden voices stirred the garden. No,
I could not think of you; I begged your pardon.

I did not see your hair or smell your skin
When the purling bloom of hyacinth perfume
astonished me. I practically rejoiced to see
I was so free.

I almost heard you laugh the day
I scared the hungry bear away
and saved the empty feeder for the birds.
But I endured.

And so I guess despite the sun
despite the blooming apple trees,
despite the perfume in the breeze,
when to the garden next I go,
I will not think of you.

Gardens Two

Lines on a Sand Cliff

Those parallel erosion lines the river made in the sand cliff centuries ago
remain somehow in the delicate wall—we could pull it down
with just our hands: a loud yell, an avalanche; yet there it stands
undisturbed except where dogs and swimmers have dug dry sluices in the form—
still it stands; its ageless indifferent triumph over the infernal patience of gravity
remains. I try so hard to find some cause for wonder in this
elaborate breastwork, these years of patient labor this
abstract aeolian rushmore of lines that are
just there—variegated, beautiful, evenly spaced parallel lines
like type on the page of the cliff, like lines of graffiti
the river wrote in the soft sand wall as slow centuries
of water evenly receding drew themselves along, as time does,
as water does, informing us with the infernal patience of gravity,
informing us—please give me your hand—informing us of nothing
we did not already understand about time and about water and the pull of the earth—
about forces so delicate—like the forces of sound in a word—so delicate
you do not feel them, no, you cannot feel them
work.

Words and Eyes

Words—and syllables or semes—accrue a sense of meaning through a history of associations, so that outside of a particular context these verbal units seem to possess meaning in themselves. If I say “dog” the almost universal reaction will be that I am referring to a particular species of animal. This meaningfulness of words in themselves has been thoroughly demonstrated to be an illusion. Words don’t “have” meanings. Words create, conjure, or negotiate meaning through actual use. Only in actual contexts, which include but are not limited to strictly verbal contexts, do words effect meanings. And any word is capable in a given context of stripping all or nearly all of its historically associated meaning. The bond of the meaning to the word is in fact so weak it can be stripped away by the merest suggestion: “From now on every time I say ‘dog’ I mean ‘house.’” What may begin as a comic substitution with short use will simply become a new meaning for the word.

Egos work in the same way. We develop through experience, each of us, what we call a personality--our "identity." But this personality, these traits by which we define ourselves and by which others define us too, can be stripped away with alarming quickness when we are put into contexts in which they are inappropriate. People’s characters are overwhelmingly situational.

Keep that in mind.

Gatesgate

Well, I've been thinking. It's about time for "-gate" to break away from its dependence on a pre-word and become a word on its own, signifying an embarrassing Washington scandal, as in "It's just a matter of time before the Obama administration experiences its first gate." It may start with the hyphen attached and/or the quotation marks or just take the plunge and go naked among us so future linguaphiles can ask how a door becomes a scandal. Then it will have to move on to the next step of a "Washington-like" embarrassing scandal and finally settle into an undifferentiated synonym for scandal, at which time we'll need to start over and replace "gate" with a new powerful suffix, "window" perhaps, and start all over. Were Robert Gates to do something Rumsfeldesque, he could hurry this process on with a "Gatesgate."

That however isn't as big a verbal gate as the one I read on the cereal box this morning: "perfekfast," no doubt a contraction of "perfect breakfast." But cleaving that final word keeping only the last syllable turns "fast" into "meal." O the circus of wording.

Where is Calvino when you need him?

From Fog on the Winter Garden

The smallest sprout attests there is no death
But that is not enough.
Be cannot be
finale of seem
when every sprout is a sign
and even the air that stings and moans
and even the nothing itself must be expressed
as it were
in being.

Nothing is never enough

the flowering April
the January wind
the winter fog that rises over the restive seeds
and hangs in the air

but still

it does remind us of things

reminds us of the icy ocean
we used to say invited us
to test our mettle past the ankles
the tingling thighs, past
the genitals and hips,
that set us high on our toes
as we inched our stomachs and chests all the way in
to our necks, skin itching with cold—and yet—
the plunge.

Blue lipped in the middle of summer
trembling on the beach
we were cold—a long time
but it was not enough
to stop us and the sun
was not enough
by the time we were almost warm
to keep us safely
on the sand. We ran
as though beckoned
and we abandoned ourselves
again and again as we always do
to the outlandish allure of things.

Gardens One